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How to prepare your films audio files for a mixer

I mixed two indie feature films in the past few months and I've mixed my own three feature films so I've had some practice editing a film then sending the audio files out to be mixed in a DAW-

This is the easy way to do it- I'm going to use Premiere Pro for my examples but this is the same process for Final Cut Pro or any other NLE-

When you are editing it is good practice to separate your audio tracks into dialogue, fx, music, and ambience tracks like this

You can have multiple dialog, fx, music and ambient sound tracks but its good practice to keep them separate- you don't want to say.... have dialog, music and fx on the same track- keep all those things separate-

It makes it easier for you and the mixer is going to have to separate them anyway- so if you do it for them you'll save money and make the mixer's job faster-

Looking at the example-What you would want to do is export one track for Dialogue01, one for Dialogue02, one for Fx01 etc- so from that example you would end up with these files- the audio files should all be the same size/length

The easiest way to do that is just to mute all the tracks besides the one you want to export like this

Then go to FILE-Export MEdia

And choose an audio only export like this AIFF

You'd then go through all your tracks exporting them on their own this way- so again, you'd end up with these files-

You also need to export a video file for the mixer to use as a reference- no need to send an HD high quality version-

For 16.9 material an 800 x 450 video is perfect- just make sure it is the same frame rate as your source material- H.264 compression is fine as well-

If you don't separate your files like this the mixer will have to spend a lot of time manually slicing up your files separating them into these parts which will cost you more in the end-

Even if you are mixing your own stuff or just mixing in your NLE this is a good workflow to have.

To send the files to the mixer you can use a cloud storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox to host your files then send the mixer the links

My goal with this game is to scare you- to create a creepy environment and give you a strange, terrifying experience in which you never know what might happen.

Most of the game takes place in first person but you do play as a ping pong ball in third person at one point so you can douse yourself in gasoline 0_0

The reason that its PC only at this time is that I'm using DirectX features in the game and DirectX is not supported on the Mac- sorry about that-

I MIGHT be creating a version of POWERLESS for the Occulus Rift- I have to see how difficult it is to do so- if its relatively easy AND the game is light enough to keep 60fps or whatever the Rift needs I'll do it- I know very little of the process so I have to learn a lot about it-